Materialization of text genres and the polysemous senses of text tattooed on the human body: Walking notebooks

Abstract

This study addresses tattoo as a social phenomenon, adopting the perspective of discourse genres. The objective is to analyze the configurations of tattoos inscribed onto the human body – understood as an occasional support for this discourse genre – in order to identify the impressions, senses, meanings and purposes made explicit and implicit through these practices. To this end, we conducted bibliographical and field research using a qualitative approach. The data were analyzed primarily on the basis of Bakhtin’s epistemology of discourse genres, discussing the relationship between genre and textual substrate and current notions about the tattoo and the human body. Field research was conducted at two tattoo studios in Teresina, state of Piauí, Brazil, and involved five interlocutors: two tattoo artists and three tattoo recipients. Discussions revealed a significant recurring number of tattoos which reaffirm the dialogic and interactional nature of this discourse genre. They also demonstrate that, as a means of conveying their desired explicit or implicit messages, tattooed subjects – the authors of their own text –use the body as a polysemic instrument to express ideas and as an incidental substrate for an epidermal grammar, thus accepting the struggle to tackle and overcome issues of prejudice, searching for recognition of its artistic and cultural value, as well as social acceptance. The body is thus used as an instrument of speech, a means of expressing one’s wishes and desires through art. This way it constitutes the metaphor of a “walking notebook”, whereby the skin is transformed into a space for definitive registration of linguistic signs, by means of symbols charged with ideological values, which move actions in the world, and through the movements of the physical and material body itself in space.

Keywords: genres of speech, tattoo, polysemic bodies.